In Issue Ten, Ece Temelkuran wrote a letter to our readers. The occasion was the publication of her new book, Nation of Strangers, that explores a moral, political and spiritual homelessness in today’s world. Temelkuran claims that we are building a new nation, whose citizens are strangers in various ways. It is global displacement, for sure, « But it is not only that. The world loses home altogether, » says Ece Temelkuran. « I’m so exhausted of this charade, » Temelkuran wrote, pointing to the words of those who do not doubt, and who consider their opinions and way of living a bulwark against change. She’s longing to find a new home in a new language, together with all those who doubt. Read it here →
We received some wonderful replies to Temelkuran’s letter from readers of our newsletter. Here, we’re sharing a response from one of our contributors, Philippe Huneman, who is a philosopher of biology.
By Philippe Huneman
« Unhomed », and « unhoming », you write in your letter about our present situation. Even when we are not refugees or in exile, we are indeed unhomed; and our future is one of unhoming:
You don’t have to be a refugee, immigrant, or exile to be unhomed. After all, this is a time when we all feel unhomed morally, politically, and many will soon lose their homes to wars, climate change and political oppression.
Reading those words, I cannot help thinking of Freud’s seminal meditation on the Unheimliche: that which is alien to our sense of homeyness, and yet, at the same time, reminds us of something familiar — making it all the more disturbing. Freud cites from Hoffmann’s The Automata: seeing automata, taking them for humans, and then suddenly realizing that they are not — that is the Unheimliche experience. Today, the automata are AI systems; and many of us have heard of the « uncanny valley »: that moment when robots become quite similar to humans in their intelligence and autonomy while still clearly remaining robots, which makes them deeply uncomfortable to have around. Unheimlich is indeed a term that describes quite well what we are facing now.
Homes today are both threatened and powerful. Threatened because many homes are in danger — because of wars, authoritarian governments, climate change and all the plagues that characterize our present. At the same time, however, homes have become powerful. People stay home and watch the world through their screens, scrolling through Instagram, TikTok. People stay home and claim a home that is not meant for everyone: « You, you, and you — stay outside! » You — the refugee, the foreigner, the homeless — stay away from my home: Italy, the US, France, India, wherever.
There is a war on plants, forests, soils and ocean – and it is called growth. (Ironically, the only thing left to grow, apart from oaks and birds, is the economy, stupid.) There is a war on the poor and on migrants. There is a war on chance, because some people dream that codes, numbers, figures and histograms might replace everything. And there is a war on words, because words are power. This is the war you have chosen to fight. This is where I join you.
You speak — or perhaps dream — of a language « without extracting anything » :
The most magical aspect of this home made of words was that it was constructed without extracting anything from the Earth. Language is the only man-made wonder created out of nothing — a poetic rejection of dialectics.
Languages are often owned by those who own the place; by those who own others, the ones below and lesser-valued than them, their subalterns. But language is also a home: a place from which these subalterns can be defended. Language offers a way to heal, even to invent a justice that has never yet occurred.
« Words, » you say, « are the last thing we can own when all is lost. » But this feeling stands in stark contrast with the fact that language itself may no longer be our home. Language — all the statements uttered since the dawn of humankind, or at least since the dawn of writing — once aggregated, processed and iterated, becomes the home of the artificial. The semblance, said Lacan – something that uses language and yet does not itself speak. This is what large language models are. And here, listen to the words themselves: because they model the language, they are not language itself. They just seem to speak, for a model always mirrors its object, and in that moment our home becomes a semblance of a home.
To have no home, or to be alien within one’s own: this, I feel, is where we stand. And for this reason, I cannot quite say where I am as I write to you.
You ask: « what is a beautiful enough word to serve us? » My search is similar. A word enough to name the world, play with its sounds, express my awe or my anguish — that’s how speaking would make you, or me, feel at home wherever we are.
« Do you still have faith in words? » Or, « Like any true believer, » you ask, « do you have doubts ? »
Here is the key. Machines that answer all our queries — and promptly so — do not believe, hence they do not have doubts. According to them, the world is one, massive, compact; there is no alternative version of it. The machines associate words to issue the most probable word, as we know. They process incredibly quickly the probabilities of everything, based on the probabilities of almost every group of words. That way, they unfold the most probable world, and that’s the whole story. Thus, the world is flattening: it’s a world made of averages and probabilities — swimmers most probably swim, poets write sonnets, historians grow a beard, wear glasses and ties. (Ask Midjourney to generate a photo of a historian and you’ll see for yourself.) What about a world where swimmers write poetry? The language was our home, when it was all about poetic swimmers. It allowed us to forge these chimeras and live by them. Improbable destinies; far from the average historians and swimmers.
I am reminded of a short story by Philip K. Dick from 1956. It later became a movie, in which Tom Cruise seems almost to invent giant iPads, sweeping his arms across vast screens on which he reads the future. The story is simple: predictions are produced by clairvoyant mutants endowed with psychic powers. The police act on the basis of their visions in order to prevent the future they foresee. But there is always a minority report: one of the mutants has seen the future differently.
In the movie, this third clairvoyant, the minority report, represents freedom: the capacity, for Tom Cruise, to choose not to become the person the whole apparatus (science, expertise, computers) expects him to be, namely: a murderer. I am a philosopher, and philosophers do not often like to use big words. « Freedom », what a mess! I remain rather agnostic about it. But what I do know is that the minority report is what we must preserve. The minority report is that single swimmer who sings odes. It is this young, pink-haired, Chappell-Roan-styled historian investigating the end of the Persian Empire.
The minority report has no place in the language of semblance, in that vast model of « the language » that continuously predicts the most probable and then brings it into existence. That’s why it needs us to care for it.
